The road to enlightenment

Knowledge management seems to be slowly dying as a concept. While most organizations
understand the business benefits that come from a knowledge management program,
few know how to implement one. The technology has even been promoted - as recently
as a year ago - as a "silver bullet" to solve all of an organization's
problems. But, like CASE tools in the mid-'80s, it hasn't lived up to the hype.
Despite all this, knowledge management is still an idea companies should implement.

The reality is that most organizations don't have a choice - they must create
and use some kind of knowledge management function in order to survive. Companies
today need to be able to continuously evolve and grow with their customer base.
Personalization means more than just providing a customer with a customized
Web page. It means knowing your customers well enough to send them targeted
marketing information, and using data about your customers' buying patterns
to detect product and pricing trends. Knowledge management also lets a company
decide which vendors to use and which to drop.

Get your knowledge here!

Organizations possess enormous amounts of knowledge that is stored in their
employees' brains, on paper and in computers. Yet the real issue is how a company
can gather and share this intelligence in order to create a business advantage.
A good knowledge management process integrates people and technology with collaborative
processes to create a smarter and more competitive organization. It also lets
employees use knowledge from the enterprise as a whole, not just the information
found in their department.

There are two core types of knowledge: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative
knowledge includes any numerical data, such as financial figures, order quantities
and customer information, such as age and income. Qualitative data includes
best practices and non-numerical customer data, such as product comments by
customers. A good knowledge management system lets users mine and manipulate
both types of data discretely and together.

A simple, yet effective, knowledge management program can be created using
a data warehouse and a collaborative/groupware tool, such as Lotus Notes or
GroupWise, to share information. The key is to make the information available
to decision-makers across the enterprise so that they can support their business
processes.

There are three basic steps to managing a corporate knowledge base. The first
step is to gather and model organizational knowledge requirements. Next, you
must design and create a corporate knowledge management system using tools that
store, mine and manipulate data. This system must include interfaces between
the knowledge base, outside quantitative tools and transaction processing systems
that supply the data to the knowledge base. The final step is ongoing support.
This means meeting user needs when more data is required during the discovery
process, and integrating new business units that may be created or acquired.

Step 1: What do you know?

A "knowledge analyst" first gathers and models knowledge requirements.
Knowledge requirements are modeled as lists of decisions, accompanied by what
users need to know to do their jobs better and faster, and what they want to
know. This is different than the traditional systems analyst role. A knowledge
analyst can't simply supply decision support capabilities and a bunch of data.
You must also bear in mind that "needs" and "wants" are
very different. A user's "needs" are simply the data that allows that
person to do their job. It is a user's "wants" that provide discovery
capabilities; for example, finding the correlation between buying beer and diapers.

Knowledge analysts must also supply users with data from other departments
and business units across the enterprise. While this can be a major political
problem, it is the heart of the knowledge management idea. Most organizations
have people who are walking encyclopedias of corporate knowledge. These individuals
have been with the company for a long time, and they possess valuable tips and
tricks for getting things done more quickly and efficiently - knowledge everyone
should possess and use. However, cross-functional knowledge bases are often
difficult to create because of turf battles between department and/or business
unit managers.

During the modeling process, overlaps will be found between departments and
business units. These overlaps in knowledge requirements and what people already
know are precisely why knowledge management is so valuable. For example, it
is possible that a purchasing manager in the bakery division of a food company
needs the same type of vendor information that the purchasing manager in the
cereal division needs. Being able to share information helps everyone involved.

Step 2: Creating the knowledge base

Once knowledge requirements are modeled, the analyst works with designers to
design and create databases that store the knowledge. Remember that there will
be both quantitative and qualitative databases. Quantitative data is typically
stored in data warehouses that can be accessed through online query tools, and
interactive and batch reporting tools. Qualitative data can also be stored in
data warehouses, but best-practice and tip information is usually best stored
in groupware tools such as Lotus Notes. Most groupware tools let users quickly
search text-based databases for specific terms and keywords. In turn, best-practice
libraries can be categorized according to business function, customer type and
so on. While this can be done in a data warehouse, it is usually a little more
graceful in groupware.

The knowledge bases and transaction processing systems that supply the data
must be linked. This is accomplished by using extract and load capabilities
in the groupware or data warehouse tools, or via middleware. Either way, the
knowledge bases must continuously pull data from transaction processing systems
in order to keep the data up-to-date.

Step 3: Keep it growing

The final step is to provide ongoing support. The continuous improvement and
constant re-evaluation of information needs is critical to maintaining a useful
knowledge base. If data becomes stale, or tools don't grow with an organization's
needs, the knowledge base quickly becomes obsolete. While users will drive continuing
requirements, it is useful for the knowledge analyst to make the rounds periodically
to stay current with users' needs, and to find any new requirements.

Know your future

The real benefit of a knowledge management system is the ability to share knowledge
between departments and business units. Yet it is often difficult to convince
management that everyone in an organization needs to be connected. In addition,
cost/benefit and ROI data is difficult to calculate for knowledge management
programs. You may intuitively know that more information helps you do your job
better, but quantifying the cash value of that information can be next to impossible.

Cultural issues and politics kill more projects than any technical glitch ever
could. The major problem with knowledge management is that organizational politicos
typically bristle at the idea of sharing information because many employees
still believe that knowledge is power. Wrong! Sharing knowledge is where the
real power is. If you do your job better because you received information from
someone in another division, you look good. If you supply knowledge to someone
who does a great job, they'll remember you the next time you need help ... and
you'll look good.

In order to succeed in today's global marketplace, organizations must gather
quality information. Most companies, however, are overwhelmed by the quantity
of data they possess because they have no easy way of organizing and mining
it for day-to-day use. A good knowledge management system provides simple, elegant
ways to capture, share and use information. This, in turn, helps organizations
create new markets, products and services.

About the Author

Charles H. Trepper is CEO of The Trepper Group, a Minneapolis-based consultancy.